An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a device or software application that monitors network and/or system activities for malicious activities or policy violations and produces reports to a management station. Intrusion prevention is the process of performing intrusion detection and attempting to stop detected possible incidents. Intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) are primarily focused on identifying possible incidents, logging information about them, attempting to stop them, and reporting them to security administrators. In addition, organizations use IDPSs for other purposes, such as identifying problems with security policies, documenting existing threats, and deterring individuals from violating security policies. IDPSs typically record information related to observed events, notify security administrators of important observed events, and produce reports. Many IDPSs can also respond to a detected threat by attempting to prevent it from succeeding. They use several response techniques, which involve the IDPS stopping the attack itself, changing the security environment (e.g., reconfiguring a firewall), or changing the attack's content.
Users of various network services, such as email, social networking systems, and the like, typically maintain accounts with such systems that are keyed to a user identifier. Some of these network service providers, such as Yahoo, Facebook, and Google, act as an identity provider to other third party systems. For example, OpenID is an open standard that describes how users can be authenticated in a decentralized manner, obviating the need for services to provide their own ad hoc systems and allowing users to consolidate their digital identities. The OpenID protocol does not rely on a central authority to authenticate a user's identity. The term OpenID may also refer to an ID as specified in the OpenID standard; these IDs take the form of a unique URL, and are managed by some ‘OpenID provider’ that handles authentication. A so-called relying party may use the OpenID protocol to authenticate the identity of a user relative to a so-called OpenID Provider. Open Authentication (OAuth) is another standard for transferring and exchanging user credentials. The OAuth endpoints are configured with pre-shared keys between one or many providers (for example Yahoo, Google) with the consumer (ref ‘Application to be secured’). Like OpenID, OAuth uses a unique URL to validate the user and grant access between the consumer and provider.